Fix the Date

This chapter constitutes a case history of how, thanks to scholarship, a cult can collectively construct a hard fact. Because Victorian historians relied on strict chronology as an antidote to hagiography, they elected the Old English Chronicle to replace Asser’s hagiographic Latin Life of Alfred as the prime reliquary for the cult of the historical Alfred. Plummer found Alfred’s true birthdate not in the Life but the Chronicle. This dialectic of hagiography and chronology illuminates how and why the question of the legendary Alfred’s historical birthdate was first posed in 1876 by the nouveau riche autodidact Henry Howorth in his intense controversy with the aristocratic Roman Catholic Bishop William Clifford and then professionally, but shortsightedly, resolved by Plummer in 1901.